The London Traveler

Transport for London (TfL) has now announced the two winners of the competition to design the new Routemaster. One is a joint venture between Aston Martin (who obviously think the credit crunch make buses a better bet than luxury cars!) and Foster + Partners, and the other was designed by Capoco, a firm which designs buses, coaches and trucks.
I suspect a lot of people will be disappointed. Neither of these creations actually looks like the much-loved RM. In particular, the radiator of the Capoco design looks very squashed – not the friendly ‘face’ of the traditional bus, but a pudgy …read more

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Boris Johnson promised us Routemasters. And that’s what we thought we would get. (At least, that’s what most people thought he was saying. But now he’s saying no, he didn’t, he said different buses from the Bendybus.  Hmmm.)
No, what we’ll get is new Routemasters.
The Mayor has announced two competitions for designing the new Routemaster – one for amateurs (‘imagine’), and one for professional design firms (‘design’).  The amateur competition is just a bit of fluff really – prizes are up to £1,000, but they’re being awardedfor ‘fun’ and ‘creativity’.
But the professional competition might come up with a design for ‘a …read more

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Following my report on ‘Last Stop’, Ralf Obergfell’s exhibition of photographs on the last eighteen months of the Routemaster’s service for London Transport, I had the chance to interview the photographer about his work.
LT: When did you first encounter the Routemaster bus? How far back does your fascination with it go?
RO: I first saw the Routemaster on TV at my parents’ house in Staufen, on the edge of the Black Forest. I was 12 or 13 years old.
LT: How did the project for Last Stop get started?
RO: I’m a founding member of photodebut, which was set up in 2002 as …read more

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According to the Guardian this could be ‘the end of the road’ for the famous London black cab.
The taxi we all know and love is the FX4. Its friendly rounded curves and satisfying clunky doors are somehow reassuring; we know we’re safe.
The new TX4 just doesn’t have the same feel. It seems to be a bit of a pastiche of the black cab, put together by someone who really wants a top of the range BMW.
Still, there are enough FX4s out there that for the foreseeable future you’ll be able to take a ‘black cab’.
However Ken Livingstone pulled the Routemaster …read more

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